The Swedish Research Council has just announced its 2008 project grants for research in the humanities and social sciences. 106 out of 993 submitted projects (10%) have received funding. Only two archaeologists got money: Thomas B. Larsson (b. 1953) who works with the Scandinavian Bronze Age, and Susanne Berndt Ersöz (b. 1959) who works with Turkey in the Last Millennium BC. Grant recipient Lena Larsson-Lovén (b. 1956) works with Roman dress, which places her in a border zone between art studies, history and archaeology.
As I have previously documented, you need to be about 42 and a recent PhD to get a university job in Swedish prehistoric archaeology. Apparently you need to be about 55 and a chaired professor to get a Research Council project grant, though the dataset (n=1) is admittedly rather small. The fact that only one Scandy prehistorian got funded is however telling in itself.
It's the same story as last year. Don't know why I bother.
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Ah, come on, you know why we bother: what else do we want to do as much? But the continual lack of money for it does continue to suck. My sympathies and a continued hope that you'll beat the odds (and that so will I in my field...)
A new aquaintance of mine, Eva Andersson, a medieval historian in Gothenburg, have gotten a research council grant! Her PhD thesis was about clothes and dresscodes in the 14th century, so she is active in what borders to archaeology at least!
But I do not know what she will focus on now.
Well, to be fair: According to their own statistics 71% of the applicants were over 40 and of those who got a grant only 67% were over 40 - so it was actually slightly less of the 40+ that got their application accepted.
It would be interesting to see if some disciplines were more positive to younger applicants than other though...
If it makes you feel any better, my field is really linguistics and in the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), we never even show up in our parent organization's main publication, the journal "Science." I have yet to find full-time employment in spite of have two degrees in the field. I couldn't even get the main professional organization (Teachers of English to Speakers of Others Languages or TESOL) to let me take over editorship - without pay - of a minor post that only puts out a paragraph online once every three months! Maybe I got TOO old. I'm past 50 now. Hm. Them's the breaks.